 Every legal service organization needs a way to gather information about clients to provide the proper services. This is intake. Traditionally, clients have had to walk into a legal aid office or call on the telephone to learn about their options and begin working with a legal aid attorney. Today, online tools allow clients to get started working with a legal aid organization at home, at a library, in a public service agency office, wherever is most convenient for them. Online intake is a self-service, online system that guides the user through a series of intake questions that will help the legal aid office determine how best to serve the client. In most cases, users can access an online intake system from any computer using a web browser and an internet connection. There are numerous benefits to an online intake system. Staff members can't be available 24 hours a day, so offices and hotlines have limited hours. An online intake system never has to close and can be available to users who work long hours or multiple jobs. Online systems can also save time. According to pro bono gnats Claudia Johnson, between 50 and 80% of hotline callers don't qualify for legal aid. At the average office, that translates into many hundreds of hours of time spent simply redirecting people to other resources. Online intake also allows legal aid organizations to provide a lot of information that can easily be saved or pursued by the client. Everything a client needs to do or know before speaking with an attorney can be right at their fingertips. No state has offices that are convenient for all clients. Rural clients especially may have to travel an hour or more to reach an office. For many of them, the cost or time required may put legal help beyond their reach. Online intake can make legal services more accessible to many more remote or physically challenged individuals who qualify for legal help. Telling someone he or she does not qualify for services can be difficult. Sometimes prospective clients assume the decision isn't based on rules but on personal bias. Online intake systems eliminate real or perceived bias. While the user might be disappointed that he or she did not qualify for services, the prospective client can rest assured that the result was derived from the information entered. The system can also provide a positive step forward by immediately directing the user to any resources that are available. Long lines, ringing phones, mountains of paperwork, intake staff can get worn down by needing to talk to and help so many people each day. Online intake systems have the potential to reduce the number of walk-ins and phone calls, thereby reducing the stress your intake workers face each day. Online intake is a lot like your traditional intake process and has the same end goal to get the information you need to serve your clients. Let's walk through the process in general, then we'll go through each step in more detail. When a client clicks on an online intake link, she accesses a user-friendly interface that guides her through a series of questions. The answers to those questions might be triaged by the system, validated or prioritized, and used to direct the client appropriately. Perhaps some clients are flagged for a lawyer to contact ASAP, but others are referred to online resources. The system doesn't necessarily need to triage, it could just email every completed online form to your staff for instance. Or it could triage first and then email the appropriate client information. It's not ideal for you to get the information by email as someone will then have to go through a different process to get it into your case management system. Ideally, the information would be automatically integrated into your case management system. Either way, the information needs to make it into your CMS where it can be applied to the casework or you can circle back to the client for more information. And then you can, of course, help the client with his or her legal needs. Let's go through each of the parts in more detail. The first piece, the user interface, is critical. This interface, which is likely on your web portal, is made up of online forms to collect the intake information. The most important feature of your interface is that it's very easy to use. If people have trouble entering accurate information or abandon their attempt halfway through, you won't be able to realize all of the benefits of your system. At its most basic, your user interface needs to be an online space where users can view your questions and input their answers. The technology can be as simple as a web form or an online survey that automatically sends an email to your organization that contains the information or directs you to the completed questionnaire file. You can even post an online PDF with fields that users can fill in to complete the form that can then be filed in your case management system. If all you're seeking is basic information, one of these might be your best option. For more complex issues, you might want to guide people through multiple pages of forms, potentially with question logic that shows them only the questions that apply to their situation. For instance, people who say they have a housing issue might be guided to a particular set of questions while those with a child custody issue are shown a different page. However, the intake interface is also an opportunity to deliver information or services before clients sit down with an attorney. Some intake interfaces can include links for more information, dialogue boxes that display definitions when clicked, or referrals to the appropriate organization based on need. If a form needs to be completed before a first meeting, you can integrate document assembly software with your online intake system. And if you would like to provide the option to speak with someone at your office as the intake form is being completed, some systems allow you to build in a live help link that enables the user to text chat with someone who can provide assistance. Most importantly, you want your online intake system to help the client easily provide you with complete and accurate information. Think through when it's appropriate to ask people to pick a defined choice which will likely be easier for both them and you, or when you need them to type in a description. Decide carefully what questions need to be mandatory, forcing the user to answer before continuing. Make sure your user interface is accessible to as wide an audience as possible. For instance, should you think about translating it into other languages? Versions that can accommodate users with mental disabilities? Tools to aid clients with visual disabilities, such as audio screen readers or keyboard shortcuts? As we talked about, some online intake systems also include triage to sort out individuals who do not qualify for in-person legal aid and perhaps to prioritize clients based on urgency. Triage functionality doesn't usually attempt to predict outcomes or prioritize clients based on how likely they are to win their cases. Clients who must take legal action immediately to prevent themselves from becoming homeless or losing their children die or circumstances that can lead to significant harm without immediate help are what these triage systems attempt to prioritize. Court dates may also be a factor in prioritizing clients. Once data is captured by your online form and potentially triaged, how does your staff see it? There are a number of different ways the information can be handled. Some organizations get a file emailed to them that staff members can use to follow up with the client by phone for more information. Intake staff then manually input the data in their case management system. As we discussed earlier, it's not optimal to deal with one-off emails every time someone fills out a form. Automating data imports into your case management system can save a considerable amount of staff time, though it will likely be more complicated to implement. This process involves a couple of steps. First, in order to get the data into your case management system, the automatic process will have to translate the information from the web forms into a format that the case management system can understand. The planning for this translation is called mapping. For example, as a result of the mapping process and help from your programmer, your system will know to take the information entered in the last name field of your form and put it in a specific place in your case management system. Before you actually load new data into your case management system, the automatic process will also need to figure out how it corresponds to what's already there. For instance, is the client a new one, for which a new client record should be created, or are they already in the system? This is called a duplicate check. It saves you from recording the same information twice. You should also run a conflict check to make sure you're not already representing another party on the case. If a conflict is found, some systems may be able to block file access based on user so that each party can be fairly represented. Once the data is appropriately filed in the system, you can flag the new intake data appropriately and make sure that the right people will see it. Like document assembly, there are numerous ways you can put an intake questionnaire online to gather client data. If the information you need to collect is fairly straightforward or you have a very limited budget, you can use nearly any kind of online form, questionnaire, or survey as your user interface. Options include form router, woofoo, or Google Forms. These options are inexpensive and easy to use, but can be a little cumbersome because they require you to export data to a spreadsheet and then upload the data from your spreadsheet into your case management system. However, there may be ways to automate the upload into your case management system with the help of a skilled programmer. You can also create an intake form using web forms in your content management system. Simple web forms are a basic feature of nearly every content management system, so any organization with a website that can be updated by non-technical staff members can consider this option. Many legal aid organizations use Drupal to manage their websites. An experienced Drupal programmer can create a series of guided forms that integrate with your case management system. As the need for online intake systems has grown, case management system vendors have worked to fill this need. Systems such as legal server, camps, and legal files offer the opportunity to create intake questionnaires in the system or can be customized to include them. These forms can be used by internal staff or the general public. Many organizations use the Center for Access to Justice and Technology's A-J Author software as their user interface for online intake and document assembly, in part because it was one of the first options available to legal aid organizations. A-J Author is a cloud-based, single-page web application that can run on any browser and is designed to recognize and reformat for mobile devices. Its flexible and user-friendly interface allow you to carefully guide the user through the intake process and provide help along the way. The Legal Services Corporation is a major funder of the project and has made it free to legal aid and pro-boto organizations. If you want to integrate A-J Author into your case management system, you'll need an experienced programmer who is familiar with both A-J Author and your system to make that happen. Neotologic, like A-J Author, is flexible and easy for clients to use. Neotologic can be embedded in a website and offers sophisticated information gathering and logic tools. Now that we've looked at how online intake works and a few of your software options, let's summarize some of the questions and considerations as you think about developing your own system. You could certainly do online intake without doing any triage, but it's worth considering the extra complexity because searching for legal help can be confusing for clients. A triage system can direct your clients toward the information or organization that can be most helpful without requiring them to understand all the laws, thresholds, and the entities that can help. Triage can also help you reduce the number of phone calls or office visits and help individuals screen themselves and direct themselves to the resources they need. Automatic integration allows you to move intake information seamlessly into your case management system, but the process can be complex and integration adds to the cost of implementing and maintaining an online intake system. Also, integration may not be the right choice if your organization is planning on changing case management systems in the near future. However, not integrating requires people power. If those people are all volunteers, the costs stay low, but if paid staff time is required to upload or re-enter intake data, not integrating could carry a significant hidden cost. Partnering with other organizations across your state for instance on an online intake project can potentially provide a centralized source of help to your users and can distribute costs and responsibilities across multiple organizations, but it's not a trivial process. Having a number of voices and decision makers will exponentially complicate the project. Don't underestimate the work you'll need to put into defining the input forms, how to ask for the information you need, and potentially the logic needed to branch people from one form to the next. If you're going to do triage, you'll need to define the rules there as well. A well thought out user friendly process can make the difference between success and failure. You may want to form a committee that meets regularly to figure out and negotiate these issues. Note that it is easy to get stalled at this stage as individuals and organizations with different points of view argue over the best way to word a question or how best to move from one question to the next. Strong leadership and organized project management are key to keeping your project on track. Your project manager should be responsible for tracking timelines and responsibilities to make sure everything runs on schedule. Managing scope and budget, and ultimately costs, ensuring that everyone communicates, managing files, and making sure everyone who should review the rules or system has a chance to provide input. Organizations that have implemented large technology projects all stressed that project management is one of the most important considerations in the planning process. The costs can range significantly depending on how sophisticated your system needs to be. On the low end, using simple forms and manually exporting data, you can spend about $5,000. However, if you hire programmers to integrate your interface and case management system, and invest significantly in creating the best user experience possible, you may need to spend $40,000 or more. The need for legal help is so great and the expectation for 24-hour access is only growing. Online intake is, and will always be, an important tool as legal aid looks boldly to the future. There are a number of resources and examples available online. Follow the links or carry out your own web search based on what you've seen here. Thanks for watching and good luck.